Everyone on the Internet is an Idiot

Today, or over the weekend, or something, a bunch of stuff accidentally got listed as "adult." The error may or may not have come from a third party merchant. More importantly, I didn't even know we had an adult section. Although a few weeks ago I did discover these costumes. Now all I need is a girlfriend and a box of thin mints. But I digress.

Back to the story: Some of the books that were accidentally listed as adult were gay, so a bunch of gay authors wrote angry blog posts. Apparently it is inconceivable and offensive that "Full Frontal Feminism" was mistaken for erotica. I'll keep my first impressions of the book's content to myself, but I will tell you that there's is a picture of a naked woman on the front.

As the day progressed I received more and more emails about how angry people on the internet were...getting all angry. And writing about it. Kind of like I'm doing right here. Then something strange happened: First I felt offended, and then my faith in the human race dropped even lower. I don't know when I actually started to care about Amazon. I mean, I love saying "I'm a programmer at Amazon" because people have heard of it and its a lot simpler than trying to explain what a "research programmer" does. I don't think its particularly special though. I've never really cared whether people shop there or not. I don't care about the Kindle, or...whatever else is going on at the company. Oh crap I have to be somewhere Wednesday. Anyway, I didn't think it was possible for someone to offend me by saying something negative about the company. But when people started saying Amazon did it on purpose, when people started conspiracy theories based on wild assumptions made by idiots on blogs, then I started to get offended. I mean, seriously: a dark policy conspiracy to delist gay stuff? Thats too retarded even for an old James Bond movie.

If someone thought we had entered a secret deal with AT&T to slow down people's browsing if they didn't pay for some "premium" internet access, or maybe if we were secretly using machine learning on people's search queries to identify "terrorists" for the FBI to terrorize, that would be cool. Purposely unlisting some books, but not really unlisting them, just mislabeling them as adult, for about a day, on a day when most of the employees want to be home not answering their pager, for no other reason than to piss off our customers? Retarded.

So then I started reading the actual blogs, and even the people on slashdot were basically assuming there was malicious intent. I thought they were smarter than the rest of the internet. Now I'm beginning to wonder what else I read there wasn't true. Maybe The Pirate Bay isn't really on trial. I don't know. I actually hadn't been reading slashdot and digg, on account of an overabundance of real work to do, and after this I don't think I can go back.

But then...then I went on youtube, and searched for one of my favorite Nightwish songs to listen to, and, by chance, started reading the youtube comments. For a song. And there it was that I found plenty more ignorant bullshit. That is when I realized that everyone on the internet is an idiot.

And now I don't care anymore. If, someday, some ostensibly straight girl doesn't want to make out with me because I work at Amazon, maybe I will care about this. Or I'll just tell her I work for Microsoft.